Graham Dickson: Timber

A very broad character-led exploration into a ravaged Hollywood

In Austentatious member Graham Dickson's new one-man (mainly) character show, we are dropped into a near-future world where Hollywood has finally caved in on itself. As the sex-abuse scandals piled up on one another at a rapid rate, women decided to completely abandon Tinseltown, leaving the men behind to pick up the pieces of a broken culture. With a dysfunctional industry on its knees, one documentary-maker decides that she'll return to the scene of so many crimes to seek out the truth about a mysterious character called The Bear.

While the narrative becomes more cumbersome as Timber proceeds, the main enjoyment comes from Dickson's portrayal of a selection of characters (a super-agent called Sammy Slim and veteran cinematographer Mo Shapiro among them). Also, his Netflix-style opening is an amusing device particularly when he hands the remote to a front-row resident who has the option of playing the movie or watching the trailer again.

The overall effect brings to mind the multi-character work of Tom Neenan and Dickson's Austentatious comrade Joseph Morpurgo, but Timber lacks the jokes of the former and the ingenuity of the latter. It is, however, a solid example of Graham Dickson's ability as an actor, improviser and creator of very broad individuals.

Graham Dickson
Hollywood has fallen. In a golden land once filled with promise, what happened when the cameras stopped rolling? When the well ran dry? When the women fucked off? Now, one woman is going back, to track down The Bear… In Timber, nonsense, danger and mystery congeal into a dystopian fantasia of character…